You know that look someone has when they’re in love for the first time? The permanent half-smile like they’re recalling a joke from the night before, the easy laugh, lightness of step? That’s the look Scott Griffiths ’97 has. He glows. For one, he’s married to Kellie Pederson ’98, a ray of sunshine herself. The…
Dr. Sarah Johnson stood in Spur Lake with waders on, her hand searching below the surface as part of an effort to revive wild rice. She pulled up what looked like a long white monster the size of her arm. “It’s only a water lily rhizome,” she said, reassuring the shocked faces in front of…
“I knocked forty-six years off that tree,” April Stone ’95 says, pointing back to her house. She’s referring to the pale, bark-less core of a black ash log atop a sawhorse. April lives at the southeastern corner of the Bad River Reservation, her house tucked in beneath an umbrella of healthy hardwoods. April separates black…
First, the loon report. Sitting on his back deck looking out at Lake Wilipyro near Drummond, Roger Dreher tells his guests about a pair of nesting loons, how they first tried to hatch loon babies in early May, made a second attempt in late May, and made one last unsuccessful try with two eggs on…
In October, red leaves floating to the ground are about the only sound at Tyler Forks Community Forest, located thirty minutes south of campus. The 590-acre forest was purchased by Landmark Conservancy in 2019 and has become an additional outdoor classroom and recreational area for students and the general public. In the last two years,…
On a sunny, summer Monday afternoon, Dr. Alissa Hulstrand, assistant professor of biology and affiliated faculty of the Burke Center, ate lunch at Maslowski Beach while keeping her eyes on the seagulls nearby. She was waiting for one of them to defecate so she could swoop in for the poop. One did but she realized…
On our day off between class sessions this March, I took myself on a bookstore tour of Bayfield County. I promised myself I wasn’t going to spend any more money on books; I was only going to look. So, as I walked out of Honest Dog Books with a thick compilation of Mary Oliver poetry,…
If Halee’s life were a book, it would be magical realism—one filled with dragons to slay, charming characters, and chance encounters gripped with meaning. Halee Kirkwood ’15, who uses the pronouns they/them/theirs, is an adjunct professor at Hamline University, editor of the literary journal Runestone, teacher at the Loft Literary Center, a poet and writer,…
On September 1, 2021, Todd Rothe ’10 and Jamie Tucker ’16 pulled on leather gloves, hooked up a trailer to a truck, and began collecting garbage bins of food scraps, coffee grounds, and paper products to haul to a farm field to begin the composting process. “We’re turning organic waste into soil, and we can…
In 2018, flooding over Father’s Day weekend carved a hole through a major highway in far northwestern Wisconsin, disrupting travel for months and sending three times the amount of sediment that flows each year into one Lake Superior bay. Now, a project aims to slow the flow of runoff as the region faces more frequent, intense storms…
